


Space Pig

by TheSigyn



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-04
Updated: 2010-05-04
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:52:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4609179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are Slitheen in Downing Street, a space pig in autopsy, Tosh in a medcoat and Jack in a tizzy. What else could go wrong today?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Space Pig

**Author's Note:**

> I thought for a long time that Jack had waited patiently for “the right version” of the Doctor to come along. And then I realized, the Doctor bounces through time and space like a pinball, and I doubt he carefully gave Jack a detailed itinerary of where he’d been before he met him. So how the hell would Jack know? And once I realized that, I considered... would he even care overmuch, after waiting over a century?

  
Monday, midmorning.   
  
“It’s going to crash all right,” Tosh said, looking over the trajectory. “Right in the center of London.”   
  
“When?” Jack asked.   
  
“Sometime tomorrow.”   
  
“All right,” Jack said. He took a deep breath. “Okay, Tosh, you and Suzie... no. Owen!”   
  
Owen looked up from the medibay computer, where he’d been researching general alien anatomy for the more common species that fell through the rift.   
  
“Two week training period over. Time you got your feet under the table, kid, you’re going to London.”  
  
“Both of us,” Tosh said with a bit of a grin. “Together.”   
  
“Oh,” Owen said. “Ever joyous laughter.” And turned back to his computer.   
  
Tosh swallowed as Jack turned away. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with him?” Tosh asked in a small voice. “He’s... well. You’re the one who really knows him, and...”   
  
“He has to learn to accept everyone as part of the team,” Jack said to her. “You can handle him.”   
  
“But it really is going to crash,” Tosh said. “It really is alien. And it really is his first field assignment. I think you should go.”   
  
“Tosh, I’m needed here. What if something nasty happens with the rift while all this is happening? The eyes of the world are on London now, we need someone experienced ready and on scene just in case.” Jack might say that. But Tosh had learned in the previous two years — Jack really didn’t like leaving Cardiff. He always seemed to be waiting for... something.   
  
“But Dr. Harper is kind of...”   
  
“Tosh,” Jack said, turning hard. “This is an assignment. Take it, or...”   
  
He didn’t have to finish it. “Not a problem,” Tosh said without ire.   
  
  
***  
  
Tuesday, morning.   
  
  
The laptop video camera zoomed in on Jack’s face, the tile of the Hub contrasting with his dark hair. “I don’t think we really need to do this,” Tosh said to him from their hotel room in London. “I’m sure Torchwood London is on it.”   
  
Jack stared at her over the screen. “I’m quite sure it is,” Jack said, and he pulled up an image from the daily news, the cracked and broken image of Big Ben with the alien spaceship obviously in the Thames. “And what do you think the protectors of the British Empire are going to do to something that did THAT?”  
  
Tosh looked at the half demolished landmark and had to concede that Torchwood London probably wouldn’t appreciate it. “They don’t like Cardiff horning in on their territory...” Tosh said, making one last effort.   
  
Jack’s image flickered back onto the screen, this time annoyed. “Tosh, hack Owen’s credentials into the autopsy, and get him over there!” He glared at her. “Since when do you argue with me?”   
  
“Not arguing,” Tosh said with false brightness. “Just making sure the two of us won’t get caught and retconned by Torchwood London, that’s all.”   
  
“I’ve made some calls,” Jack said. “They’re mostly slipped into the deconstruction of the ship. They don’t care much about the alien itself.” Jack sighed. “Is there a problem with you two? Do I need to come up there?” The tone of his voice said that if he did, it was not going to be good.   
  
“No problem,” Tosh said, easily. “We’re on it.” She slammed down the laptop and looked over at Dr. Harper. He was still passed out on his hotel room bed. Since the authorities had discovered a body, Tosh had already hacked Dr. Harper into autopsy, and herself as his assistant. But Owen, it seemed, had spent his night in London getting more than a little sloshed, hadn’t gotten back to the hotel room until nearly six AM, and now he seemed to have much more interest in sleep than aliens. She’d tried waking him, but first he was passed out, and by now he had a hangover. Tosh had two choices. Either tell Jack that they couldn’t do what he had ordered, and why. Or... keep Owen’s job by pretending to be Doctor Harper.   
  
She looked over at the abrasive, arrogant, angry man who had spent the last two weeks making the Hub a living hell. Serve him right to get fired and retconned. But the terrible thing was... he looked awfully vulnerable asleep like that. When he had stumbled in this morning drunker than she had ever seen anyone, she’d wanted to kill him. But now... his face was so open and sad, all the arrogance and the abrasiveness washed away. Tosh suddenly wanted to — she wasn’t sure what. Pet him, maybe. Or take care of him. Or maybe just let him sleep.   
  
She already knew what she was going to do. “Boy do you owe me one, Harper,” she muttered, but he was way too hungover to hear her.   
  
  
***  
  
  
  
Tuesday, afternoon.   
  
  
“Yeah?” Jack flipped on the phone.   
  
“God, Jack!” Tosh’s voice sounded tense. “The weirdest thing just happened!”   
  
Jack rolled his eyes. Suzie had gone home for the evening, and Jack was enjoying a little quiet time in the hub. He’d trained Tosh well enough, and she had Owen with her. This was a crash landing, not an invasion, and Torchwood London (as much as he hated them) was there to pick up the slack. What on earth could she need him for? “What is it? Report!” Jack said over the line.  
  
“You know the alien I was... we were investigating?”   
  
“Yeah, it looked like a pig, so what? Judoon look like rhinos, and Seratips look like sea otters, what’s the deal?”   
  
“No, it really was a pig! It came alive, and this weird man in a leather coat came out of nowhere and just started spouting alien techspeak like it was the twice times table! No one seemed to have the vaguest clue who he was, but he knew absolutely everything. He said it was actually a pig, and had been put together by—”   
  
Jack cut her off. “What was his name?”   
  
“What?”   
  
“The guy in the leather coat?” Jack snapped. “What was his name?”   
  
“He didn’t say,” Tosh said. “He just called himself a Doctor.”   
  
Jack felt as if he had swallowed molten lead. He had spent the last hundred and fifty years growing steadily more desperate. For the last twenty-five years, he’d no longer cared WHAT version of the Doctor he caught up to, on what time line, he just had to know what was wrong with him, and if there was any way of fixing it. Dragging himself through the seventies and early eighties had been hard enough, knowing all the time that the Doctor — not his Doctor, but the Doctor nevertheless — was just sitting there at UNIT headquarters, day after day, puttering about with a broken TARDIS — oh, what Jack wouldn’t have given to break that TARDIS! Just to keep that man STILL for TEN MINUTES!   
  
Then that time during the queen’s coronation in the fifties, when it had been pretty well established that Rose Tyler and the Doctor had been dealing with some television blank-face virus... and Torchwood had shot him in the head for trying to get there in time.   
  
There had been over a dozen close calls. When the Doctor was in Cardiff, Jack had been called away. When he was elsewhere, Jack was waiting for him in Cardiff. It was a nightmare! It was as if fate kept yanking his strings, and all he wanted was for things to make sense.   
  
He couldn’t take it anymore. He’d been behaving himself with Rose. Rose Tyler, who had been an adorable eight year old, and a dangerous sixteen year old, he hadn’t done more than nod at in the street once or twice passing in her estate. But the Doctor... The Doctor could handle a little time-stretch, yes? Bend the time-lines a little, just for long enough to... explain things? Fix things? Just help him!  
  
Jack knew Rose was with the Doctor now. He didn’t know their exact history, but he knew once Rose had gone with the Doctor she’d disappeared for a year. That year was up.   
  
And who Tosh had just seen. That was the Doctor. That was THE Doctor, HIS Doctor! His unspoken thoughts for the last few days ricocheted through his head, ‘Don’t want to go to London.’ ‘Routine mission.’ ‘Little to no danger.’ ‘Don’t want to leave Cardiff — I’m not saying it, but I’m waiting — waiting — waiting....’   
  
There was really only one thing to say.   
  
“FUCK!”   
  
“Jack?” Tosh’s voice sounded awkward over the phone. “Did I do something wrong?”   
  
“No. No, just if you see him again, hold him!”   
  
“Hold who?”   
  
“The Doctor! I don’t care how, tie him to the wall, shoot him in the foot, handcuff him to ceiling, anything! And watch him! Take your eyes off him for a second and he’ll vanish, I can tell you that for nothing.”   
  
“But Jack...” Tosh said. “He’s already gone.”   
  
“Of course he is,” Jack said. Jack was already running for the SUV. “But he hasn’t GONE gone yet, not until this alien thing is settled, I’m sure of it, and you might see him again. Just try! For me, will you? If you do nothing else ever for me in your entire life, just hold that man and keep him from running away!”   
  
“All right, Jack,” Tosh said. “Why?”   
  
Jack was about to say that the Doctor was an alien, but then he remembered Torchwood London. They were pretty hardnosed about the Doctor, and even though they’d been giving Jack a pretty free rein since that fateful night in 1999, they undoubtedly still kept a monitor on the doings of Torchwood, Cardiff. “Just do it. How’s Owen holding up on his first assignment?”   
  
Tosh was silent for a long moment, then said over brightly, “Oh, he’s loving every minute.”   
  
Jack didn’t feel like pressing her on it. “I’m driving up to London. If you see that man again, HOLD HIM!”   
  
  
***  
  
  
  
He didn’t get there in time, of course. Number 10 Downing Street exploded violently, leaving the only survivor a woman called Harriet Jones. Among the casualties was Jack Harkness, his Torchwood SUV crushed by the falling rubble.   
  
He came back to life with a groan, shards of broken glass embedded in his skin, and a twisted spear of metal pinning him to the driver’s seat like a butterfly. He died two or three more times before he managed to get the wretched thing out of his torso. Climbing out of the rubble, he was stopped by the police, nabbed by the military, interrogated by UNIT officers and finally commandeered by Torchwood London, who really DIDN’T like him horning in on their territory. Finally he persuaded them to let him call Tosh and Owen to pick him up at Canary Wharf. “Let’s get out of here,” Jack said. “Powell Estate.”   
  
“Where?” Tosh asked from behind the wheel.  
  
“Oh, move!” Jack snapped. He pushed Tosh out of the way and took over the driving himself, recklessly speeding down the streets of London toward Rose’s flat. Both Tosh and Owen hung on for dear life.   
  
Finally he came squealing to a stop, nearly running into a kid scrawling the words BAD WOLF on the graffiti on a wall. He pelted down the pavement, Owen and Tosh following at a careful distance. Suddenly Jack spotted a familiar face. “Micky!”   
  
A rather diffident looking kid turned around to look at Jack. “Who’s askin’?” he muttered.   
  
Jack caught up with him, panting with exertion. He hadn’t really recovered from his deaths of an hour ago, and he was still covered in blood. “Where’s the Doctor?” Jack gasped.   
  
“Gone,” Micky muttered. “With Rose. Do I know you?”   
  
Jack snorted in frustration. “No,” he said. “No, no you don’t.” He paused. He debated asking him for Rose’s phone number, but he wasn’t sure how Rose’s intertemporal cell phone worked, exactly, and besides... Micky didn’t recognize him. Which meant, of course, that he was still too early. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Damn.”   
  
That bastard! Why the fuck did he have to run away in the first place? All of time and space he had, and he couldn’t spare one minute to come back and collect Jack? Jack had gladly given his life for those two, and now all he wanted was death. It wasn’t too much to ask, was it? But no. The Doctor was gone, and Jack was alone, and confused, and waiting, waiting, waiting, still waiting...   
  
Jack turned back to where Tosh and Owen were waiting for him. As he came into earshot, he could hear they were having a muffled argument. “Well, you should have woken me up, then shouldn’t you?”   
  
“I tried like four times!”   
  
“Trouble?” Jack asked.   
  
“Can we get on, then?” Owen asked, turning away from Tosh with as much finality as dropping a tissue in the wastebin. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved. And I’d better be driving us all back to Cardiff, because you drive like a madman, Jack, and no offense, Tosh, but women drive way too slow.”   
  
“Excuse me!” Tosh snapped.   
  
“No chance of that, Tosh,” Owen said. “You don’t really seem to know what you’re doing, though, eh?” He sauntered toward the car, leaving Tosh staring in indignation, and Jack still gazing desolately down the alley.   
  
“I just can’t believe this,” Tosh said, shaking her head in frustration.  
  
“Hell of a day, huh?” Jack said to her.   
  
Tosh was still glaring after Owen as she muttered, “Fucking pig.”   
  
Jack glanced up at the sky, searching for a blue box he wasn’t going to find today. “Fucking space pig,” he growled.   
  
He put out his hand, and Tosh let him take hers. Harboring the same resentment toward two very different Doctors, the two of them headed back to the car, and home. 


End file.
